As the telecommunications industry has grown, new technologies have been introduced to handle the continual increase in call volume recognized by both the telecommunication service providers as well as the companies that take advantage of such telecommunication services. In the past, most telecommunication (i.e. call) processing was completed at a central office typically operated by a large telecommunication company. More recently, corporations and smaller business have begun to invest in and operate smaller switches such as a private branch exchange (PBX). A PBX is a telecommunications system within an organization or enterprise that switches calls between enterprise users on local lines while allowing all users to share a desired number of shared external or trunk lines. The main purpose of a PBX is to save the cost of requiring a line for each user to the telephone company's central office. Additionally, PBXs provide voice mail services to companies as well as other custom calling (i.e. call processing) features, such as call forwarding, call waiting, hunt group designations, and so forth.
Although PBXs may be useful in their own right, many businesses involved with sales and customer support functions require additional call handling and/or processing functionality not provided by an average PBX. A typical call center, for example, includes a collection of resources (including PBXs) that together make or receive high volumes of phone calls. A key component of most call centers is what is referred to as an automatic call distributor (ACD). By using an ACD, an organization can route incoming calls to the appropriate call-handling agents employed by the organization. For example, an organization may employ sales agents to handle sales related calls, or support agents to handle customer support related calls. The ACD could thus be configured to route incoming sales related calls to the organization's sales agents and route the incoming customer support related calls to the organization's support agents.
FIG. 1A illustrates an exemplary call center incorporating the teachings of the prior art. In FIG. 1A, clients 101–103 are shown connected to call center 120 operated by the XYZ company. Call center 120 includes ACD 104, and agents 105–107 each of which are associated with the XYZ company. ACD 104 routes incoming calls received by call center 120 to any of XYZ's agents 105–107 depending upon, for example, each agent's capabilities and/or availability. If all agents are busy attending to other calls and a new call is received by call center 120, the new call may be placed on hold until one of XYZ's agents 105–107 become available. As soon as one of XYZ's agents 105–107 ends a current call, the new call received by call center 120 is routed by ACD 104 to the newly available one of XYZ's agents whether the agent wishes to receive the call or not.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,884,032, the call routing functionality of an ACD was integrated with services provided by the World Wide Web (WWW) to enable on-line “live help.” Specifically, the '032 patent provides a method of establishing two-way voice connectivity between a customer of an organization and a human ACD agent employed by the same organization while sharing common screens of information on a WWW page. Although this may enable more detailed discussions between the organization's customers and agents, it does not provide each agent with the ability to choose whether to provide the requested assistance, nor does it enable an independent agent not associated with the organization to honor the request for assistance.